Guardian Ariko

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Ariko stood to its feet as the hero rolled in front of it, sword and shield raised. The blue Bokoblins in front of them passed uncertainly as the hero readied his weapons, but slowly walked forward.

The hero sheathed his weapons and tossed a blue orb into their midst. Ariko watched it arc through the air in confusion, wondering why the hero had decided to start playing some sort of game, and then the sphere exploded in a burst of blue light. The detonation launched the Bokoblins in every direction, and Ariko snapped one out of the air with its claws.

Sprinting forward, the hero leaped into the air in an impressive somersault and slammed his broadsword in a one-handed attack at one of the Bokoblin, and the enemy stumbled away. Pounding forward, Ariko launched its entire body into the air and bodily crushed the opponent. Behind him, the hero used the golden chains that stopped time to freeze another enemy mid-jump, and attacked it with his sword. Once the arrow had turned red, the chains snapped and the Bokoblin sailed off into the distance.

Three down, a hundred to go.

Pulling his bow out, the hero strung an arrow with what appeared to be a bomb strapped to the end. Ariko dismissed the thought immediately. Surely no one would be stupid enough to tie an explosive to an arrow. Besides, there was no way that, aerodynamically speaking, it would even be capable of flight.

Ignoring sound reason and the laws of physics, the hero shot the arrow over the heads of the Boko in front of them. A moment later, a large explosion marked its landing.

Ariko stared in blatant confusion at the hero as he readied his weapons once again. Why in Hylia would anyone try that? Aside from the sheer idiocy of trying it, how did it even work!?

As more Boko made their way up the hill, Ariko decided that figuring out this moron of a hero could wait until later. Charging up a blast, the Guardian fired at a dense crowd and accidentally took a chunk out of one of the houses. Ariko winced as it appraised the damage, but realized that it wasn't the time to be thinking about property damage. It still hoped whoever had owned that house had insurance, though.

Despite the added assistance, the Boko continued to push the hero and Ariko back up the hill. As the massive crowd of Moblins and Bokoblins gathered, Ariko's eye narrowed. That golden Boko was coming through again.

The hero tensed as he saw the shiny skin of the primary opponent, but Ariko's attention was focused on the Hinox clambering through the passage leading into the village. The hero could probably - possibly - defeat the golden Boko, but there was no way he could take on the Hinox, and Ariko's standard blasts weren't going to do much.

A thought occurred to it.

Ariko turned around and practically sprinted up the hill. The hero shouted an annoyed, "Hyyaah!?" before the golden Boko leaped towards him, forcing him into combat.

As for Ariko, the Guardian ran to the shrine, promptly plugging itself in. Slumping, Ariko deviated all power from its factory and even its legs, directing all of it to the firing mechanism. The sudden surge of energy from the shrine hit Ariko at exactly the right moment, and Ariko fired.

Except this time, it wasn't a short burst of energy. It wasn't a bolt of blue light.

This time, it had all the power of everything Ariko had inside itself along with the sustained energy of the shrine itself, and was transformed into a howling beam of absolute destruction. It slammed into the Hinox's eye and detonated over and over again, and even as Ariko maintained it, even as it felt its insides melting, it knew that its objective would stay the same.

Its vision turned black as its eye dimmed, the final vestiges of the blast that had annihilated the Hinox's entire upper body, and the last thing to cross its view was a simple objective. The objective it had sworn it would obey to its death.

Defend Kakariko Village = Completed